The Birth of Economic Woman

Summary

Modern humans have been living in the Arctic for over 30,000 years and their ability to adapt to the ecological limitations and challenges is relevant to questions of human adaptation and evolution. However, we know very little about the actual technologies and nutritional implications that were necessary to develop in the northern latitudes. Here we focus on two aspects of Arctic dietary practices that are little understood in the literature and yet would have been essential to successful occupation of the extreme Arctic environments—the seal poke storage system and the fermentation of foods. We present our original research on the construction and nutritional benefits of this kind of storage and the ways foods have been fermented. Embedded in our discussion of Arctic nutrition is the critical role of women and their applications of transformational technologies and their essential contributions to the Arctic diet.

SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may upload your paper, poster, presentation, or associated data (up to 3 files/30MB) for free. Please visit http://www.tdar.org/SAA2015 for instructions and more information.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Celebrating the 100th Anniversary of the Death of Primitive Economic Man: Nutritional Archaeology for the 21st Century

Keywords

Spatial Coverage